There is nothing easier to do or more guaranteed to win, maintain or establish esteem among the college educated elite than to parrot the common received wisdom concerning its idols. Charles Darwin is highest among them. Doing that is far easier than the far less done exercise of reading what he said. I have found that the reading program of those who have deified Darwin is generally limited to reading perhaps, Voyage of the Beagle and, maybe, selected sections of the first edition of On the Origin of Species - though generally as found clipped and curried in secondary sources. And that's the high end of the effort of the faithful. A lot of them couldn't even correctly state the title of even those two most often mentioned books by their hero.
It is far more likely that those who are prepared to judge the case on the facts of what he said, and most of them are far more likely to be those who already have doubts about him are the ones who will read what he said and go into depth as to why he said such horrible things as:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by
centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate,
and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time
the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18.
'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be
exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be
wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as
we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon,
instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Anyone who, for a second, doesn't understand that the people whose extinction Darwin was enthusiastic for were definitely not white, Northern Europeans of Anglo Saxon ethnicity - you would think his reference to "Caucasian" would clue them off as to who he believed the victors would NOT be - and that Darwin knew his audience of educated Western white men and, to some extent, women would know he meant black people they are plainly lying about just what he's saying. He explicitly, as science, advocated that the extinction of entire races "throughout the world" and their replacement by "the civilised races of man" would be a wonderful thing. He clearly mean that it was a good thing that white Europeans would commit genocide against dark skinned people in Africa and elsewhere (he's explicitly hardest on those who live in South America, the Pacific islands and Australia).
I looked hard at that, rightly, infamous passage and found that he not only explicitly advocated genocide as a boon to "civilised races of man" he also likely
lied about what Schaaffhausen said **to say it. The agreement between himself and his esteemed friend and colleague Ernst Haeckel, saying the same kinds of things in German for a German scientific and popular audience, is complete and expansive in asserting the desirability of genocide.
Darwin wrote that passage in 1871, Victor Carus issued his German translation not long after that. Darwin was already a major force in German biology due to the enthusiastic promotion of his writing by, most importantly, Victor Carus and Ernst Haeckel. Just 33 years later a young German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer was conducting biological experiments on children in a German concentration camp in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today and shipping skulls of those killed there to German universities. I
posted on that last year:
Fischer being employed as a scientist at the Kaisar Wilhelm
Institute is especially eye-opening because he had participated,
scientifically, in an earlier, pre-Nazi era genocide by the German
government in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today from 1904-1907.
He worked at the University of Freiberg at the time, where he continued
and advanced in the science faculty, no doubt the hundreds of skulls
he'd sent from that genocide were considered in his favor. More than
100,000 people were believed to have been killed in it. Fischer
conducted experiments on children held in the concentration camps where
native Herero and Nama peoples and African-Germans were held in
horrendous conditions and often killed, outright. The descriptions I've
read of the practices and conditions there sound like a dress rehearsal
for the death camps of the 1940s. He and other scientists collected
body parts, notably skulls from "freshly dead" bodies for scientific
purposes.
Fischer was born in 1874 and was, beyond doubt, one of key figures linking the generation of Darwin, those educated under the influence of Darwinism in science and the genocides in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. There is absolutely no question that his activities in the genocide of the first years of the last century were exactly in line with what Darwin said in that passage. The "civilised" even, perhaps "enlightened" scientist from the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute scientifically studying the members of
"the savage races" being killed by members of
"the civilised races of man" who were fulfilling Darwin's prophesy that they would
"almost certainly exterminate,
and replace, the savage races throughout the world. Or, as Eugen Fischer may have reflected on the evolutionary character of his work:
In irgend einer künftigen Zeit, welche nach Jahrhunderten gemessen nicht
einmal sehr entfernt ist, werden die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit
beinahe mit Bestimmtheit auf der ganzen Erde die wilden Rassen
ausgerottet und ersetzt haben. Wie Professor Schaaffhausen bemerkt hat,
werden zu derselben Zeit ohne Zweifel auch die anthropomorphen Affen
ausgerottet sein. Der Abstand zwischen dem Menschen und seinen nächsten
Verwandten wird dann noch weiter sein; denn er tritt dann zwischen dem
Menschen in einem noch civilisirteren Zustande als dem kaukasischen, wie
wir hoffen können, und irgend einem so tief in der Reihe stehenden
Affen wie einem Pavian auf, statt dass er sich gegenwärtig zwischen dem
Neger oder Australier und dem Gorilla findet.
As I mentioned before, with the work Eugen Fischer co-authored with Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur on eugenic science about 18 years after his participation in that first genocide of the 20th century had advanced his position in science, the thinking of Charles Darwin - cited throughout the book which rests solely and ultimately on the theory of natural selection - is indisputably tied to the thinking of Adolph Hitler***. He was given the book in 1924 while he was in Landsberg prison by someone who thought it would help him develop his political theories. It was while in prison he also wrote Mein Kampf, his own theory of "Lebensraum" was essentially the same idea as what Darwin articulated as hard science, merely being more specific about who were the "
wilden Rassen" ["savage races"] were to be exterminated and replaced by which of
"die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit"[the civilised races of man].
Of the three authors who gave Hitler his formal and developed idea of natural selection, Eugen Fischer survived the war and continued as a professional scientist. He never suffered much from his direct participation in both of the genocides, the mostly forgotten one, hardly ever mentioned, in 1904 and the one in the 1930s and 40s. He devoted his science to finding reasons for the Nazis to murder Jews but, as a man of science, he wasn't ever made to answer much for it. He published a memoir after the war whitewashing his activities and can be said to have gotten away with it. I can't help but wonder if a "civilised" scientific community had not, internationally, bought into the idea of natural selection, more or less with all of its racist - not to mention class - bigotry if the first one might not have been the one too many for such "civilised" men to tolerate. As it was, you have to wonder how many of those who might, might have learned of the mass murder in Africa might not have thought they were witnessing what Darwin prophesied as an inevitable working out of a force of nature.
* As he so often was, Darwin was even more explicit in who he believed were the superior races in his correspondence, and, wouldn't you know it, the Brits were way up their in the hierarchy.
His letter to G. A. Gaskell left little room for doubt on that count and that he was far more enthusiastic for the prospect of violent extermination than he was for the less violent forms of eugenics.
** As far as I was able to find Darwin not only lied about what Schaaffhausen said, what Schaaffhausen said in what Darwin was almost certainly referring to would have refuted what Darwin was claiming about the evolutionary significance of such a genocide. I have to wonder how closely anyone ever checked Darwin's citations of other authors, it wasn't the only lapse in citation I found.
*** Fischer's importance in establishing the link between the theory of natural selection and the Nazi's mass murders can't be understated. As Mahmood Mamdani pointed out:
The genocide of the Herero was the first genocide of the twentieth
century. The links between it and the Holocaust go beyond the building
of concentration camps and the execution of an annihilation policy and
are worth exploring. It is surely of significance that when General
Trotha wrote, as above, of destroying "African tribes with streams of
blood," he saw this as some kind of a Social Darwinist "cleansing" after
which "something new" would "emerge." It is also relevant that, when
the general sought to distribute responsibility for the genocide, he
accused the missions of inciting the Herero with images "of the
bloodcurdling Jewish history of the Old Testament." It was also among
the Herero in the concentration camps that the German geneticist, Eugen
Fischer, first came to do his medical experiments on race, for which he
used both Herero and mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men.
Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he
taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was
Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who did unsavory genetic experiments
on Jewish children at Auschwitz. It seems to me that Hannah Arendt
erred when she presumed a relatively uncomplicated relationship between
settlers' genocide in the colonies and the Nazi Holocaust at home: When
Nazis set out to annihilate Jews, it is far more likely that they
thought of themselves as natives, and Jews as settlers. Yet, there is a
link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to
the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became
possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to
exterminate it with an easy conscience.
